The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs - a real-life Tony Stark - and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new makers.

How Google Works

Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary - and frequently contrarian - principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes listeners inside Google headquarters - the Googleplex - to explain how Google works.

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built

In just a decade and a half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming private sector.

Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Here is THE book recounting the life and times of one of the most respected men in the world, Warren Buffett. The legendary Omaha investor has never written a memoir, but now he has allowed one writer, Alice Schroeder, unprecedented access to explore directly with him and with those closest to him his work, opinions, struggles, triumphs, follies, and wisdom. The result is the personally revealing and complete biography of the man known everywhere as "The Oracle of Omaha."

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

Ten years ago the idea of getting into a stranger's car or walking into a stranger's home would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it's as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb have ushered in a new era: redefining neighborhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business, and changing the way we travel. In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, another generation of entrepreneurs is using technology to upend convention and disrupt entire industries.

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

In little more than half a decade, Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising effects, even becoming instrumental in political protests from Colombia to Iran.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

Comparing Google to an ordinary business is like comparing a rocket to an Edsel. No academic analysis or bystanders account can capture it. Now Doug Edwards, Employee Number 59, offers the first inside view of Google, giving readers a chance to fully experience the bizarre mix of camaraderie and competition at this phenomenal company. I'm Feeling Lucky captures for the first time the unique, self-invented, yet profoundly important culture of the world's most transformative corporation.

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

In this, his first audiobook, Tony Hsieh - the widely admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer -explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success.

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company's early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world's most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution

Behind the bitter rivalry between Apple and Google - and how it’s reshaping the way we think about technology. The rise of smartphones and tablets has altered the business of making computers. At the center of this change are Apple and Google, two companies whose philosophies, leaders, and commercial acumen have steamrolled the competition. In the age of Android and the iPad, these corporations are locked in a feud that will play out not just in the marketplace but in the courts and on screens around the world.

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the Battle for the Internet

Digital Wars starts in 1998, when the Internet and computing business was about to be upended - by an antitrust case, a tiny start-up and a former giant rebuilding it. Charles Arthur here examines the differing strategies of the three best-known tech companies in their battle to win control of the exploding network connecting the world. Microsoft was a giant - soon to become the highest-valued company in the world - while Apple was a minnow and Google just a start-up. By February 2012, Apple was worth more than both Microsoft and Google combined.

Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World

On May 21, 2014, Admiral William H. McRaven addressed the graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin on their Commencement day. Taking inspiration from the university's slogan, "What starts here changes the world," he shared the 10 principles he learned during Navy Seal training that helped him overcome challenges not only in his training and long Naval career, but also throughout his life; and he explained how anyone can use these basic lessons to change themselves - and the world - for the better.

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

Steve Jobs

Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination

Uber is one of the most fascinating and controversial businesses in the world, both beloved for its elegant ride-hailing concept and heady growth and condemned for CEO Travis Kalanick's ruthless pursuit of success at all cost. Despite the company's significance to the on-demand economy and the mobile revolution and the battle for global dominance that Kalanick is waging against politicians and taxi companies all over the world, the full story behind Uber has never been told.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions…and Created Plenty of Controversy

This is the remarkable behind-the-scenes story of the creation and growth of Airbnb, the online lodging platform that has become, in under a decade, the largest provider of accommodations in the world. At first just the wacky idea of cofounders Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb has disrupted the $500 billion hotel industry, and its $30 billion valuation is now larger than that of Hilton and close to that of Marriott.

Boyd Tschaggeny says:"A Modern Day Example of "The Innovators Dilemma""

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You Need to Know to Get a Job in the New Economy

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown in a blender. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? If you want to work at Google, or any of America's best companies, you need to have an answer to this and other puzzling questions. Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? covers the importance of creative thinking, ways to get a leg up on the competition, what your Facebook page says about you, and much more.

The Virgin Way: Everything I Know about Leadership

While building the Virgin Group over 40 years, Richard Branson has never shied away from seemingly outlandish challenges that others (including his own colleagues on several occasions) considered sheer lunacy. He has taken on giants like British Airways and won, and monsters like Coca-Cola and lost. Now Branson gives an inside look at his strikingly different swashbuckling style of leadership.

Dark Pools: High-Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System

In the beginning was Josh Levine, an idealistic programming genius who dreamed of wresting control of the market from the big exchanges that, again and again, gave the giant institutions an advantage over the little guy. Levine created a computerized trading hub named "Island" where small traders swapped stocks, and over time his invention morphed into a global electronic stock market that sent trillions in capital through a vast jungle of fiber-optic cables.

Publisher's Summary

Here is the story behind one of the most remarkable Internet successes of our time. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, the book takes you inside the creation and growth of a company whose name is a favorite brand and a standard verb recognized around the world. Its stock is worth more than General Motors' and Ford's combined, its staff eats for free in a dining room run by the Grateful Dead's former chef, and its employees traverse the firm's colorful Silicon Valley campus on scooters and inline skates.

The Google Story is the definitive account of the populist media company powered by the world's most advanced technology that in a few short years has revolutionized access to information about everything for everybody everywhere.

In 1998, Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, "change the world" through a search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free.

While the company has done exactly that in more than one hundred languages, Google's quest continues as it seeks to add millions of library books, television broadcasts, and more to its searchable database. Listeners will learn about the amazing business acumen and computer wizardry that started the company on its astonishing course; the secret network of computers delivering lightning-fast search results; and the unorthodox approach that has enabled it to challenge Microsoft's dominance and shake up Wall Street. Even as it rides high, Google wrestles with difficult choices that will enable it to continue expanding while sustaining the guiding vision of its founders' mantra: DO NO EVIL.

I listed to both this book and "Search". This book has more colorful and historical stories on Google. But "Search" has better material on history, strategy, and technology. I would recommend listening to "Search" first and this one second.

I purchased this book in order to get a detailed look at the ideas and practices that made Google the success it is today. While this information is present, it is so overwhelmed by the fawning and sycophantic praise of the company and its founders that I was completely distracted.

Within the first few minutes, the author has already dubbed the company founders as geniuses, in a class by themselves, and more worthy of praise than American inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. And that's just a sample.

It makes it very difficult to trust any aspect of the book as objective.

The Google Story is a great story to know and definitely worth listening to, but don't expect the best as far as writing style or narration.

The writer often switches back-and-forth between Larry and Sergey's first and last names making parts of the story a little hard to follow (as to who's doing what) until you get used to their names. The author also paints a relatively one-sided picture which is heavily Google, Larry and Sergey friendly.

Also, the narrator over-dramatizes everything which makes the story a little annoying to listen to.

I enjoyed every minute of this book from start to finish. It offers an interesting perspective into Google on both a business and personal side. I've used Google many times without ever giving any consideration into the origin of the website, how it operates or it's long range business plan. This book offers a unique insight into the personal and business sides of it's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. And provides many interesting behind the scenes details, that hold your interest throughout the entire book. This was my 4th Audible book, and was my best so far.

The authors did a competent job of presenting how Google rose to be the company it is today and where it is heading. However, there seems to be a strong bias in the way the story was told. The authors put the Google founders on a pedestal, interpreting events in such a way as to paint them as extraordinarily brillant forces of good, changing the rules of business, pervailing against vulture capitalists, greedy investment bankers and the evil Microsoft, and generally making the world a better place for mankind. Nevertheless, a good source of information for those interested in Google.

I work as a computer consultant and knew some of the google story, but these fascinating insights are truly inspirational to us computer geeks of the world. Great insights into the business behind the computer industry and how staying true to your dreams can pay off.

Very interesting book to listen to? facts I was unaware of and I closely followed this company. I would have given it a 5/5, if the author better organized the information it often repeats the same facts several times. The author gives both sides of the controversies.

I tried so hard to finish this book, but it was torture at times. It felt like I was listening to a 10 hour infomercial for Google. It had some helpful information about the founding and founders of the company, but it was so contrived that it was hard to swallow. I haven't listened to any of the other google books so I can't recommend them. But I can tell you in all honesty to avoid this one. It's a yawner.

Starts out great then as the company grows, the author reduces information and stories, but it is as expected. Okay if you like computers as I do, or want to hear of a riches to greater riches stories.

The narrator reduces what could be an interesting book into dull listen.

He has this infuriating habit of reading in a mono-tone drawl, but stretching the last word of every sentence and dropping a couple of tones. It becomes so annoying that you end up waiting for each last word drop and not listening to the text! It's almost if he took cheap correspondance course in news reading.

3 stars for the book, 1 star for the narration. Avoid.

7 of 8 people found this review helpful

Danielle

Broendby StrandDenmark

11/14/06

Overall

"Interesting insider look at Google"

Ok, I agree, the Narrator is a little irritating with a soppy voice - if you can get over it, the book gives a fascinating insiders view on how Google started, it's work ethics and future plans and goals. Very inspiring.

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

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